Sun Microsystems Inc VP Java architecture, Jim Mitchell says the company will submit a specification for Java to the International Standards Organization’s PAS process this month together with an explanatory note outlining out its plans for maintaining the specification and assigning trademarks. Sun says it would have been very upset if ISO’s SC22 computer language committee had altered its PAS publicly available specification in such as way that changes would be applied retrospectively. Mitchell hadn’t been de-briefed by Sun’s SC22 delegate when we spoke to him so couldn’t comment on the substance of any of the changes. Meanwhile, Sun will next week announce who is to lead its real-time Java working group. No-one’s taking any more bets on IBM Corp’s Greg Bollella. The task then is to choose experts to be in the group and solicit proposals. Other expert groups being created in the wake of Sun’s new Java community development process include JMAPI and boundary scan. Sun claims there are plenty of others gathering steam. And Sun says it fully intends to enable Java cloners – non-licensees – to be able to use its Java test suites to evaluate compliance. It will happen through a third party to which Sun will outsource its JCK Java compatibility kit program plus the support Sun says it will require. At the same time it said it expects Java developers will need to use JCK as a part of their development efforts.
